Tarshis, Lorie (1911–1993)

Abstract

Tarshis was born in Toronto, Canada, on 22 March 1911. After a commerce degree at the University of Toronto, he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he took a BA in 1934 and a Ph.D. in 1939. His years in Cambridge, 1932–6, which coincided with the emergence of Keynes’s General Theory, shaped much of his subsequent professional life. His notes for Keynes’s annual series of eight lectures on his work in progress for the years 1932–5 have become an important source for those interested in tracing the evolution of Keynes’s views. The two Cambridge revolutions of the 1930s, Keynes’s and imperfect competition, focused the analysis of his Ph.D. dissertation, ‘The Distribution of Labour Income’. From this came two classic articles in 1938 and 1939 which, along with a contemporaneous piece by John Dunlop (1938), forced Keynes to reconsider his generalization that real and money wages moved inversely over the trade cycle and its implications for the assumption of perfect competition that underlay the analysis of the book (Keynes 1939).